Here
by Shadowed Mediocrity
Summary: [dark postseries] What the world might have been like if Yoh had stayed dead, and what comes after for everyone who followed him. [chapter one, part one: Ren and Faust find Anna at last, and a proposal is made.]
1. Prologue

Here

Summary: Dark alternate universe; post-series. What the world might be like if Yoh had stayed dead.

Author's Note: This was written for Anna's birthday (July 22nd). It may or may not be continued, depending on various things. Not sure on pairings, although romance is probably not going to be particularly high on my list of things to have done in this fic. –waves hands- WORKING on You're Mine, but I'm also working on some freelance projects that may actually pay off. So. Expect the next chapter when you see it.

This is a prologue.

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_Here are the thoughts  
__Of something like truth  
__Here are the nightmares  
__That nothing can soothe_

And there she woke, again and again, to see him arched back (and made flat and papery, like vellum and parchment that has faded of age), flung away against a great tidal wave of light. There had been no dramatics, no lights, nothing to give him the death of the hero that he had always been, but he was gone nevertheless, as surely as if he had been turned to an ornate creation of paper and burned.

The first time she started awake was to the touch of his hands over her forehead, delicate and still.

"You're burning of a fever." He said and she sat up, clenching the thin blankets tangled up in her legs to stare at him. Daylight shot through the shuttered windows, and his face did not belong where she could see it.

"There." He said, and his fingertips brushed her face again. The smile on his lips was terrible and sweet, his eyes an echo of the light in her dreams. "Have you lost your voice, Anna?"

"No." She said bluntly. Then, "Get out."

"You're hardly well enough to be issuing commands." He said. One side of his mouth curled up like the lithe lines of a cat, and he leaned forward, his hands even against the bones of her shoulders, pushing her back. His long hair draped against her sides like a mantle, layering her thoughts and burying them in incomprehensible thickness. "Sleep – you need it."

She closed her eyes momentarily and regretted it; memories rushed over her in a great flood of images: Yoh and Hao, black puppets suspended against the light, a soulless corpse, ghosts made corporeal whose shields were broken one by one, and the fading of glory into failures and memories...

Anna opened her eyes and looked up, into his narrow and smiling face.

He said, "Is there something wrong, Anna?" And for a moment the awkwardness hovered over his features, familiar and tantalizing as the presence of a ghost.

There was no ghost, consumed and taken, only the remnants of a personality dissolving into the presence of a person that she had hated and never known.

"Yoh's dead." She said. He only smiled more widely, taking her unresisting hand and pressing it to the pulse at his wrist.

"I'm alive." Hao said, as if pleased by the thought, and rose to exit the room before she, ailing and faint as she was, could find something to throw at him.

-

_Here are the words  
__That have not been spoken  
__Here lie the dreams  
__Scattered and broken._

The second time she started awake, she knew Yoh to be dead, his teammates to be gone, and Hao to be in the kitchens, calmly leeching from her refrigerator.

She stumbled down the stairs in her haste, her hand solid and white against the rail, and found him leaning his elbow against the table, watching the stairs as if he had known of her coming all along, and had been waiting for it.

"Are you sure you're quite better?" He inquired, all solicitous charm. She ignored it.

"Get out."

"But you're sickening," The shaman pointed out, smiling placidly. His eyes on her were steady with the sharpness of bones whittled into stakes. "You can hardly be trusted to care for yourself. What would Kino think if she knew that I had left her precious prodigy to kill herself through neglect?"

It was not sickness but shock and she could not understand what could have taken her so long to recover. Grief was not an illness, though men died of it as though it were, and she was not a man. Holding to the one certainty, she said, levelly, "Kino wouldn't think worse of you than she thought already, and it wouldn't matter if she did. What matters is that I've said it once, and this is the last time I will say it: get out."

"Or you'll do what?" Hao nibbled carefully at the edge of a bit of curry bread that he'd found in the fridge. She remembered that Yoh had not cared for it and the sight of him seemed so loathsome so as to make her sick.

She gripped the edges of her beads, her eyes set as if her features had been etched lightly over the surfaces of a stone. "I'll kill you." She said and he smiled.

"With what?" He said, and drew the last bite of curry bread into his mouth to be swallowed. The tone of his voice was cuttingly courteous. "I am Shaman King now – but with more vision than any of my predecessors have had. They could hardly learn to use the Great Spirit in the lifetime they had. While I…"

"While you," she said, curtly, "are a fool."

His eyes locked onto hers, hard as diamonds, and she remembered (now) why her nightmares had all been wreathed in a curling haze of flames, prevalent with a dark stare that did not leave her even in her dreams. "You forget yourself before the new Shaman King." He said with a faint smile.

"I forget nothing." She snapped, and he pulled away to lean against the back of his chair (as if it were a throne of gold, of gleaming things whose illusions she could see if she slitted her eyes and dreamt), half-glaring before recalling himself again and transforming his features into a luminescent beam.

"Well then." He said, standing, "here is a memory of me to last until my next visit." His smile was easily laconic, though with a hint of hard sarcasm that embittered his expression to something she could not understand; as alien to his features as a mask of ivory. Before she could step away, he had moved, with his sinuous snake's grace, to stand beside her frozen figure. Clasping her hand as if it were his own, familiar to him, and dear, he brought it to his mouth and touched it to his lips.

The touch seared through her nerves like a blast of flame, as if she had been placed in a furnace to be slowly decimated into nothingness. A tearing sensation came, papers of memories and all that she had ever been gradually shredded into nothingness, and, superimposed over her distorted madness, the vision of Hao's unmoving smile.

She felt his hands, one sliding gently beneath the bend of her knees, the other to support her back, placing her gently upon a chair in the kitchens as though she were a doll. "Your furyoku's gone." He whispered, and the tiny murmur fell into her ear as though into a deep well; she could not hear the echo, the splash, the resonance that would tell her that she had acknowledged his words at all. "I may bring it back when I feel I want to, Anna, but for now, enjoy your life as an ordinary girl." He touched his fingers to her mouth, an intimacy like a kiss. "I have weaklings to kill, after all."

He swept across the floors in an intricate movement like a dance, crossed the threshold and was gone in a burst of flame.

* * *

_To be continued._


	2. Chapter One: Part One

Here

**Summary**: Dark alternate universe; post-series. What the world might be like if Yoh had stayed dead.

**Author's Note**: Been a while since I updated. I hope you'll forgive me, for all that this was only ever an experiment, and intended to stay a curious little one-shot. But it occurred to me, and I couldn't help but write this next segment.

The chapters are not chapters, but disjointed segments of them, for I am far too lazy to write large chunky chapters at once. Once the fic is complete, I may go back and sort them all into proper documents, but for now, prepare yourself for a mess of Chapter 1: Part I, Part II, Part III, etc.

Also, 'Here' is a working title. I had a better one, but it vanished into dreams when I woke.

Experimenting with a new writing style. What do you think?

* * *

_Chapter One_

Six days passed in numbness, without count or understanding, and a routine that touched upon mechanical. Each day she would wake to the silence of the house, realize that the whispers of the ghosts were only slight shimmers at the edges of her vision, and wander downstairs in search of something to occupy her thoughts.

It was difficult not to remember him; his brutal smile and careless arrogance, as if he ruled her actions. As if he'd thought he'd _won_, and that was an intolerable thing – the idea that she might have lost to the boy who had stolen away her Yoh and called it not theft but the restoration of a lost piece to complete the puzzle.

Anna hated smugness, buoyancy. There was no such thing as the best if you were not alone on the planet, though evidently _he_ did not think so.

The garden was an inadvertent entity, an event that had ensnared her mind as she had passed its seeds in the form of a free sampling envelope shoved through the slot in the door, and had dragged the rest of her down when she had gone to free herself from its grasp. She had never grown plants as a matter of pride, but then, she had never lived in a world bare of spirits, where the only sound in the house was the creak of her own feet, up and down the steps in constant monotony.

There were first times for everything, and it was a better first time than most when she went down into the stiff, tiny plot at the back of the house, knelt awkwardly and began to comb the dirt out into furrows. The sun had tossed only a few light rays over the horizon when she had come out of the house, but by the time she had arranged the channels to her liking (this had taken several hours, debating how to organize the seeds and where to plant them), the heat had swelled into a force like the heart of a flame.

The seeds were placed neatly in the hollows, the soil pressed carefully over them (a mother embracing a child) and she spent the rest of the morning methodically pulling out the weeds that had grown in the backlot. She had never noticed before the collection of wilderness that had assembled like an invading army in her backyard – had taken the little, scrawny lot for granted, and never looking after its upkeep. But she did now, and though she drew out the clinging plants, ignoring the stinging of nettles against her fingers, it occurred to her that the battle might wage on into eternity. They had the backlot now, and they would not give it up as easily as that – the war might be futile, her hopes useless.

Her fingers scraped against the earth, and the arid crumbs fell away from her hands as she brushed them absentmindedly against her skirts, pulling the last weed from the plot with a determined tug. Something blurry shone at the corners of her eyes. Touching the edges, she felt the dampness and wondered vaguely if it was raining.

She turned her back on the garden then. Head bent, eyes blank, she went back into the house, shutting the screen door with a sharp clack.

-

On the seventh day, she woke to the sound of wood, shouting in muffled bursts against the assault of fists outside it.

That she could hear muffled curses behind the solidity of the wood did not encourage her to answer the door, but something like familiarity and intuition prompted her, and she bent her fingers over the cold metal of the knob and twisted it open.

The boy standing outside had not changed, though when she had thought of him, she had been certain that he would have. Nothing could stay, after all, in a world that sketched life for all to see in a brief moment before carefully marking all traces of it away. But he did not seem to have changed; the same gleam to his eyes, the same set to his shoulders, taut and angry – a predator belabored with movement.

"Where the _hell_ have you been." It was not a question, and neither was the abrupt, quick movement he made as he strode past her into the house. In the gloom of the dusty shadows his eyes seemed to cast light snapping with flames against the walls, a conflagration kept barely under control.

"Where do you think I've been?" Her voice was not nettled, but vacant of annoyance - without menace or hatred or anything save a slight twinge: _I washed those floors. It should not have been me washing them, but someone else, and now that he's walking over them, I shall have to do them again._ When he did not reply, she said, simply, "Here, of course."

"Stupid." He turned and snarled at her openly. "Of course I've known that."

"Now, Ren." A shadow echoed over the threshold, and she swiveled, sharp with instinct, to see Faust leaning against the doorway, smiling wanly. "He's not feeling very well." The doctor explained courteously to Anna, inclining his head in a curt bob of civility.

"_Kisama_." The boy growled. "Anna's not a fool, though she's acting like one. She knew that already."

"Of course." Her tone was distinctly noncommittal. "Why else would you tread your dirty feet across my floors, and not consider the fact that I would have you wash them afterwards?"

His lips drew back in the silent beginnings of a scowl before he appeared to think better of it, settled his teeth behind his mouth again in a gritty, speaking look. "Your floors," he said, speaking in staccato clips of syllables, "are the least of your worries right now." His eyes narrowed as he glanced over the house, golden eyes appearing to take note of something that she could not see in the shadowy ceilings, the walls that seemed as fragile as paper. "Has Hao been to visit you yet?"

She hesitated a moment, but a moment was all Faust needed.

"Ren." The man said softly, and after a moment, the violet-haired shaman's glowering subsided into his usual dark stare.

"So he's been here." Ren snorted, kicking at one of the walls as he spun his spear in one hand, staring moodily at its whirling gleam as if he thought that he might divine the future's secrets there. (Anna made a mental note to have him clean the walls, too, when the visit was over) "I should have guessed. _You_ should have guessed." His gaze swung accusingly towards Faust. "We could have gone to one of the others, rather than coming here."

"I had thought that Anna would need us." The shaman said gently.

The Chinese boy put his shoulders back and sneered again. "We're not going everywhere to _heal_ people, Faust." He snapped. "We're going to find the people who can still stand with us against damned _Hao_."

"You mean you yourself cannot?" Anna inquired, and he turned upon her, his teeth drawn out in fury, the spear snapped out as if he thought he might impale her with it.

"I assume Hao stole your furyoku too." Faust said, his voice carrying over Ren's low and baleful mutters. She looked at him; his eyes were smudged around with black as if he had touched soot to his eyes – or as if he had not slept in years. "I have studied the matter; it does not appear to be something that will last for longer than a few weeks. But Ren—"

"Does not plan to let a _kisama_ rule the world for more time than he needs." The boy barked. "We're going to find everyone _now_, and we're going to gather them before Hao can get to them."

"If Hao can't find them," The doctor reminded Ren gently, "he will go on looking for them, which does not suit the purpose."

Ren made a low, rough chuckle. His mouth slid from its snarl to curve in deliberate malice. "He can find them," he told Faust, "and be welcome to them if he can get past the pointed end of every weapon I have with me."

"He must have done that already," Anna pointed out calmly, "if you don't have furyoku now." She returned his glare with perfect equanimity, her gaze not reflective but dull, the shine of it worn away in fatigue. "Do you want to kill Hao or yourself?"

"I'd like to kill _you_." Ren snapped, but abated.

"That," said the _itako_, "will have to wait. If you can kill Hao and you still want to kill me, you may; provided I see his death first."

The boy glanced away then, and made mutters about how he didn't truly think her to be worth killing – that she was safe, but Hao was not.

Faust, however, raised his head and his brows to glance at her. His watered blue eyes were shot with crimson lines that made it difficult to match his gaze, and so she did not. "Then you are coming?" The words were not so much a query as a test – but of what, she did not know.

She pulled in a breath, stared at the empty ceiling, thought of the sounds of ghosts and weeds underground, twining about the seeds that she had planted to choke the life from them before they had begun to grow, and said, simply, "Yes."

_.to be continued._

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Review Replies:

Thank you, as always, for the encouragement.

**Chibi-Ra-Chan: **No Hao yet. :) I anticipate seeing him soon, however; if only because he rules the world at the moment. Literally.

**asn water**: And in this segment you see the beginning of what Hao did to the others. –grins-

**Isiri:** Thank you. –smiles- Probably this is not what you anticipated in seeing Anna without furyoku, but I had to take into account Yoh's death, though it wasn't given any mention – I was trying for subtlety. You think it worked? Feel free to ask questions; it usually gives me ideas. –guilt at leeching off of reviewers-

**Xbakiyalo:** Well, not soon, but still – better two months late than never, right?

**neoKOS-MOS**: I was going to write her some sappy birthdayfic about Yoh attempting to make a cake and causing small explosions by falling asleep in the middle of making one, but then I realized that I'd already tried Winryfic that was far too similar in concept to it, so that was scrapped.

What can I say, I am far too fond of figurative language for my own good.

Unfortunately, the state's transient – although I'm looking forward, myself, to seeing the main characters decimated. Ah the wonders of fanfic…

It's about to become my favorite fic-in-progress (-guilt-) so I expect a fair amount of updates for this one.


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